Amanda said, “My recollection is that he had no alibi for his whereabouts when his wife was abducted?”
“Yes,” Will said. “He always denied it.”
“He didn’t do it.” Faith turned to Amanda, incredulous. “Jesus Christ, can you stop bullshitting around about this? It all lines up. The hair tie. The hammer. The month and time of day. The woods. The fucking blue Gatorade. Everything Callie said lines up, just like everything else lined up this morning when we were all sitting in this same damn room and you were telling us, berating us, warning us, that we couldn’t call this guy a serial killer when every single fucking clue was pointing to a serial killer.”
Amanda ignored the accusation, telling Will, “I want to talk to the detective who worked the Zanger disappearance. Call the super in her building. He might have the hard drives from two years ago lying around his office. If we can get—”
Faith stood up. She was looking at the photos from Leslie Truong’s autopsy. “There are nineteen women, Amanda. Nineteen women who were attacked. Fifteen are dead, and that doesn’t even include Tommi Humphrey. You know what he did to her. You know!”
Amanda took the abuse head-on. “I do.”
“So why the fuck are we pretending this isn’t connected when—” She held up one of the photos. Her voice was shaking. “Look at this! This is what he does. This is what would’ve happened to Callie Zanger if she hadn’t somehow been able to think, to act, to walk out of those woods on her own!”
Amanda let her vent.
“How many more women are out there? He could be hurting another woman right now, Amanda. Right now, because he is a serial killer of women. That is what he is. A fucking serial killer.”
Amanda nodded once. “Yes, we are dealing with a serial killer.”
The admission knocked the wind out of Faith.
Amanda asked, “Does it make you feel better giving it a name?”
“No,” Faith said. “Because you wouldn’t listen to me, but you listened to Miranda Newberry’s stupid fucking spreadsheet.”
“The source of the data is immaterial,” Amanda said. “Chance favors the prepared.”
“Unbelievable.” Faith slumped back into the desk.
Amanda directed her attention to Will. “Excluding Grant County and Alexandra McAllister, we have thirteen separate jurisdictions where bodies were found. For now, we’ll leave out the three cases where the women managed to escape. First thing in the morning, I want you and Faith to divvy up the counties with Nick. We need to light up the phones, start setting appointments and interviews. Keep it casual. Don’t give away too much.”
Will was obviously still concerned about Faith, but he suggested, “We could say we’re doing a state-wide, random check on missing persons cases.”
“Yes, good.” Amanda said, “Tell them we are studying how to streamline the reporting process. Focus on the names from our list. I need all of the witness statements, coroner reports, any photographs, recordings, forensics, maps, crime scene diagrams, investigator’s logs and the names of anyone who was on scene. And I do mean softly, Wilbur. My phone calls this morning have already caused some ripples. Our killer could go underground if he gets wind of us laying the groundwork for a task force.”
“You were making phone calls this morning to set up a task force,” Faith said. “So it wasn’t just the spreadsheet? You’ve been building up to this since the briefing, but for some reason, you not only held back that detail, you kept insisting that we ignore the obvious?”
“I’ve been working quietly since this morning, which is the operative word you seem to be missing.” Amanda put a fine point on it. “The last thing we need is some half-cocked hillbilly deputy in Butts County mouthing off to the press about how we’ve got the next Jack the Ripper in our backyard. This is how we keep that from happening. Baby steps.”
Faith blew out an exasperated sigh.
Amanda seemed ready to move on, but she recalibrated, telling Faith, “Yes, I could’ve told you earlier.”
“But?” Faith asked.
“But,” Amanda said. “I could’ve told you earlier.”
This was the closest Sara had ever heard Amanda come to admitting that she had made a mistake.
Faith did not seem mollified. There was something else. “I can’t tell her, Mandy. When it’s time, I can’t be the one to tell Callie Zanger that it wasn’t her husband.”
Amanda rubbed Faith’s back with her hand. “We’ll jump off that cliff when we get to it.”
Nick returned with the bourbon. He’d brought a ceramic mug from the kitchen. He poured a healthy serving. He offered it to Faith.
She shook her head. “I’ve got to drive.”
“I’ll drive you,” Amanda said. “Emma is still with her father. We’ll go to Evelyn’s.”
Faith took the mug. She pressed it to her mouth. From across the room, Sara could hear her swallow.
“Dr. Linton,” Amanda said. “Let’s talk about the killer returning to the victims. The Zanger story confirms a pattern.”
Sara felt caught out. Her brain was too depleted to make such a quick transition.
Amanda prompted, “Dr. Linton?”
Sara struggled to generate a working thesis.
Will saved her. “The pattern is, the killer somehow incapacitates his victims, probably with a hammer. Then he takes them to the woods. He drugs them. When the drug stops working, he punctures their spinal cords. His goal is to paralyze them, to completely control them. He keeps going back to the women until they’re found.”
Sara said, “The cut nerves in Alexandra McAllister’s brachial plexus show a progression.”
Amanda verified, “You mean from Tommi Humphrey?”
“I mean from all three Grant County victims.” Sara finally got her second wind. “I’ve always thought the three victims—Humphrey, Caterino, Truong—were a case study in escalation. The killer was trying to find the right technique, the correct dosage in the Gatorade, the best tool to paralyze them and when.”
Amanda asked, “Why the Gatorade? Why not immediately paralyze them?”
Sara could only guess. “The Rohypnol would have diminishing returns. Unless he’s a pharmacologist, that’s a very tricky drug to experiment with. Death is a severe side effect. The respiration reaches the point of hypoxia. Brain death occurs in minutes.”
Will said, “Unless he stayed with them the entire time, there must have been a point between when they were drugged and when they were physically paralyzed that they had a chance to get away.”
“He’s had a lot of women to experiment with,” Sara said. “He learns with each victim.”
Nick offered, “If you go back to the FBI profile, the guy’s a risk-taker. Could be in the beginning, he’s giving them a fighting chance.”
Will said, “For what it’s worth, Humphrey and Caterino got away. Zanger got away.”
Faith cleared her throat. She was still struggling, but she said, “Callie told me she threw up the blue liquid. Not just threw it up—she basically disgorged her stomach. That bought her some clarity so she could force herself to get up and look for help.”
Will added, “Miranda Newberry found two other women she thinks were living victims. They both walked out of the woods, but they suffered catastrophic damage.”
Sara was finally able to articulate what was bothering her about the Truong autopsy report. “Leslie Truong feels like an outlier. Her body exhibited all the signatures of the killer—the mutilation, the punctured spinal cord, the blue liquid—but she was murdered and mutilated within a thirty-minute time frame. There was no progression. He did everything at once.”
“A kitchen sink approach,” Amanda summarized.
“He was panicked,” Nick said. “She was a possible witness.”
Sara couldn’t quite get there. “It bothers me that there were no traces of Rohypnol in her blood or urine. The drug metabolizes quickly, but death shuts down that function. There should’ve been traces found in her stomach contents. She had a blue stain on her lips, but I think that was left deliberately. Looking back at it, what I remember most about that scene is thinking that it felt staged, but staged by the same person who attacked Beckey. Which I realize doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it felt … different?”
Nick said, “Jeffrey figured the killer got sloppy with Truong because he knew we were onto him. The campus was crawling with cops. The whole town was on alert.”
Sara still couldn’t pin down what was bothering her. “I’m not saying that a different man attacked Leslie, but it’s possible that the motivation was different. He kicked the hammer hard enough to break it off. That sounds like anger to me. Nothing we’ve learned about the killer so far points to uncontrolled anger. If anything, he’s completely in control.”
Will said, “It would take a lot of force to break that handle. You’d have to kick it a few times.”